Redesigning ICICI Prudential’s Campaign Management Portal

I was the sole designer for this system that manages all the communication campaigns. The new design reduced task times by 95%

new home page

Background

Campaign Management System

ICICI Prudential’s campaign management system allows users to create campaigns, and send emails, SMS, Whatsapp, mobile notifications and physical letters to customers and employees. The users then track the status of those campaigns through reports which display how many were successfully sent, how many failed, and the reason behind it. The user also has an option to upload data for these campaigns from the front end itself. Admins and super admins are responsible for user management, where they can add, remove and edit users on the system.

Research

I interviewed 10 users to understand their wants, needs and pain points. All the users who were working on the old system would migrate to the new one once it goes live. Since most of the users are experienced, a lot of training would not be required for the new system and the new system should be similar to the older one. After conducting interviews with 10 users I was able to narrow them down to two groups:

  • Business Users: They are responsible for creating campaigns, approving or rejecting campaigns, selecting data and its source, scheduling broadcast of campaigns and monitoring their status once they are broadcasted.
  • Technical Users: They are responsible for generating ad hoc reports for broadcasted campaigns, resolving issues with the system, user management, writing scripts for scheduling campaigns and sending data from source to destination, and performing disaster recovery drills.

Problem Space

After the research process I found out that the old system had three major business problems:

  1. Separate portals: Each type of communication management like email or SMS had to be managed on a separate portal. There was no unified system that could handle all the communication in one place.
  2. System’s performance: Data upload and broadcast would take a long time, depending upon the recipient count. This impacted the overall performance of the system as this made broadcasting simultaneously impossible.
  3. No real-time reporting: The campaign status reports were generated hours after the emails or SMS were delivered. Due to this, detecting any problem with the campaign would get delayed and resending communication would take a long time.

After all the interviews, discussions, walkthrough of the old system and requirements gathering process, I was also able to identify users’ main pain points:

  1. Inconsistency among portals: The flow for similar functionalities was different in each system. Some of the features were missing on the older systems like SMS management and physical letter. The email management system had extra functionalities that didn’t belong.
  2. Dependability: Business users could not access the campaign reports directly and had to take help from technical users or wait 24 hours for automatic email reports. This decreased their visibility on the campaign’s status and if there was an issue with the communication, the resolution would take a long time. Also, they had to take help from the technical users for various other tasks like scheduling broadcasts, uploading data manually, flushing existing data, etc.
  3. Unnecessary Functionalities: When the system was developed, 10 years ago, these functionalities were used regularly but now all of them are no longer used and take space from other vital functions.
  4. Lack of hierarchy: Some functions that are related in context could be grouped and that would make them easier to navigate.

Now, here come the design challenges:

  • How might we integrate all systems effectively?
  • How might we decrease dependability between different types of users?
  • How might we design a new system while maintaining consistency with the old one?

Users are overwhelmed with too many options and inconsistency in design.
Users are overwhelmed with too many options and inconsistency in design.

Solution

Through an interactive design process, I was quickly moving between sketches, wireframes and prototypes, testing wireframes and prototypes with users, and getting feedback from my manager and users. From each iteration, I learned something valuable. Some helped me make small design improvements, others helped me make major usability changes.

User Flows

  • Users will be able to log in using organisation-provided credentials.
  • The landing page will be the Home Page where they have options to navigate to other pages.
  • Users can proceed to create a campaign by navigating to Create Campaign page from the Home Page. There they can fill creation form in 3 steps and finally submit it for approval from their seniors.
  • The managers will navigate to the Approve/Reject Campaign page and will be able to see the campaigns pending approval. There they can approve or reject one or more campaigns.
  • Users will navigate to Live Data under the Data Upload option if they selected the data source as manual or go to the Test Data page if they want to test campaign broadcast with sample data. After uploading live data they will be able to broadcast that campaign immediately or according to its schedule.
  • Users will navigate to the Dashboard page to search for campaign status with live reporting. There they can search for one or more campaigns and see their report in detail.

Site Map

After going over all the requirements, I designed a site map and discussed it with the users and the development team. After the discussion sessions, everyone was on the same page for the navigation part of the system.

Sketches

I created some sketches using the results from the research and Business Requirements Specification (BRS) document. After getting some feedback from my manager and other stakeholders, I made some adjustments to the initial design and use these sketches to design other essential documents.

Initial rough sketches of key screens.

Wireframes

After getting feedback on the sketches I was able to design wireframes with essential elements grouped together. The design was approached with simplicity and usability in mind. The old systems inspired the pages’ design so the users don’t have to relearn everything and should be able to adopt the new system as soon as it goes live.

Final Design

I started designing high-fidelity prototypes after a usability testing session with 8+ users on the wireframes. We determined the main screens of the portal and used brand colours in the design. I used Figma and Photoshop for most of the designs and prototypes.

Campaign report search flow

Design Decisions

Adding a Summary Dashboard on Homepage

The reason to add a summary dashboard on the home page was that the user won’t have to dig deeper into the portal to determine key information. This will improve their efficiency since all the vital information is available at a glance. They can see the past 24-hour status of campaigns they are managing just by logging in.

new overview page
Homepage Summary. Keep track of campaign status easily.

Campaign Creation Process

The campaign creation form was divided into three parts to make it more intuitive. On this page, users can enter campaign information, then upload attachments and templates and finally verify all the information before submitting it for approval.

new overview page
Create campaign in 3 steps for simplicity

Minimal Visual Elements

The amount of elements on each screen is kept minimal. This is done to enhance the simplicity and effectiveness of the system. Too many options and buttons often lead to confusion among the users.

new overview page
Minimalistic design on each screen

In-Depth Analysis

Based on the feedback, most users didn’t need an in-depth analysis of the campaign’s data. So to make it simple for those users, I added an extra step to get to the detailed analysis. Since some campaign managers need several metrics to measure the campaign’s performance, an overlay opens up when they click the campaign name from the table. Here, the users can compare each campaign’s performance from 7 days to up to 2 years.

new overview page
Simple dashboard results
new overview page
In-depth dashboard overlay

Takeaways

Communication

Always keep all the stakeholders on the same page. Collaborating with users at the early stages of design made the entire process smooth. Since the users were experienced, they were able to clearly communicate the user flows and their issues with the existing system. This helped me with drawing sketches and designing wireframes as I already knew the entire process from start to finish.

Design

The design system is effective! I wasn’t able to anticipate the total amount of screens that would be required for the whole system. As the number of screens grew, there were some inconsistencies among them. Creating components, colour styles, and text styles helped in tackling those inconsistencies. We can also use this design system to further grow the portal if required.

Validation

The changes I made were received positively from users. I also did usability tests, with 5 users, to gauge the effectiveness of the new design.

  • With the original design, the set of tasks took 5 hours. With the new design, the set of tasks took 16 minutes.
  • Users' satisfaction with the new design (4.5/5) was 116% higher than the original design (2.1/5).

Next Steps

  • Design and engineer the portal for mobile and tablets.
  • Explore and design more features to enhance the portal.
  • Design a dark mode version of the portal.

Challenges

As the sole designer, the most challenging task was to build the design system. It was intimidating at first when compared to how detailed other design systems like Google Material Design are but in the end, it all worked out well.